Kicking the Sky (8 page)

“You have forks and plates?” Manny asked.

“Who needs them. It’s best to eat cake with your hands.”

Manny took the first chunk, digging his hand into the corner of the cake. Then we all tore into it, grabbing at big pieces without caring what fell on the floor or how much icing smeared across our mouths.

“Why don’t you guys finish that off and work on your moves a bit. The chicks dig cool dancers. I gotta take a leak.” James cranked up the dial on the radio, then lit a cigarette and headed out to the backyard. Peter Frampton’s guitar blared.

Manny was licking his fingers and shouting the lyrics that didn’t exist, just as Frampton’s guitar soared in a wild riff and the theme from
S.W.A.T
. began. Ricky twisted his body to the sound. Neither of them could stop laughing. “Do the hustle with us, Antonio,” Ricky said, just as the laser beats of a Disco Dynamite hit came on. They knew the first steps, and before long we were dancing in unison, laughing, jabbing at what was left of the cake and getting dizzy in the circling lights.

James returned from the backyard, smiling. “I’m glad you boys came by tonight,” he shouted over the music. As he said it, the street lights came on. I swallowed the bit of cake in my mouth and hurried home.

“Y
OU’LL BE TWELVE
in a few weeks and you still don’t know how to tie a proper knot,” my mother said. We were about to leave the house when she knelt in front of me in the hallway and tied my shoelaces so tightly I couldn’t feel my toes. “That’s better.”

Terri walked about twenty feet ahead of us, irritated that she had to be there at all. But my mother had insisted that today was a day for family. No one was exempt except for my father, who had left earlier to get an espresso and to avoid the crowds. We hadn’t walked more than halfway up our street when my mother stopped to stare at a man pounding a For Sale sign into the Machados’ front lawn. Senhora Machado was watching from her porch.

“Bom dia, Georgina,” Senhora Machado said.

“Angelina, I had no idea you were moving. Why didn’t you say anything?”

Senhora Machado began to sweep. She would not look at my mother. “We have small children. Rogerio says it’ll be safer away from the city. We’re going to the suburbs, Brampton. We’ve saved up some money and—” The sun beat down on my head. I tried to run my fingers through my hair but my mother gently slapped my hand, afraid I would mess up the way she had set it in the goop. “We have to think of what’s best for us,” Senhora Machado said.

My mother shifted the lace veil from the back of her head to cover her face. “Vamos, filho.”

My parents didn’t talk to Terri and me about what had happened to Emanuel, but they didn’t try to hide it from us either. It had been four days since Emanuel’s body had been found and just over a week since he had gone missing. The day after his body was found, my mother started bringing the newspaper home with her from one of the waiting rooms at St. Mike’s. She began to stack them at the foot of her night table, always folded to a story about the murder.

The newspaper reported that Emanuel was killed only twelve hours after he was kidnapped. The police said there was evidence to suggest the killers had choked him, injected him with drugs, and when that hadn’t killed him they’d held his head under water in a sink. The police had found Emanuel in a green garbage bag hidden under a pile of junk on the rooftop. He had been wrapped like a mummy in electrical tape. A man called Saul Betesh—the same one who had lured Emanuel with the promise of a hamburger and a quick buck—came clean. He had turned himself in and told the police everything. That’s how the other men were caught in a town called Sioux Lookout. They were hauled off a Vancouver-bound train. Parts of the story still didn’t make sense to me, like why they had chosen Emanuel, and what they wanted from a twelve-year-old kid.

Once on Dundas Street, we made our way toward St. Agnes Church for the funeral. The funeral procession was snaking its way through our neighbourhood. Not Emanuel’s neighbourhood—the Regent Park housing project—but
our
neighbourhood, the respectable Portuguese one in the city’s west
end where the Jaques family should have lived but couldn’t afford to. Some people were mad that Padre Costa, the priest of St. Mary’s Parish on Portugal Square, hadn’t allowed the funeral Mass to be held in his church. He blamed the media attention the boy’s death had received, said he didn’t want a magnifying glass held over the Portuguese community. We all knew that he made decisions based only on his own greed, and if there wasn’t anything in it for him, Padre Costa rarely saw the need to help. My father and uncles said Padre Costa could keep his Lincoln Continental and his false conviction, but he would pay for giving in to believing the rumours that Emanuel had known what he was doing when he agreed to go to Saul Betesh’s apartment. Padre Costa went as far as to tell some members of the congregation that he had no doubt sin was lurking in the minds of countless boys in the neighbourhood. He wasn’t going to support hustlers in his church. I worried he meant Ricky, but there was no way he’d know. I was sure Ricky wouldn’t have blabbed stuff to Padre Costa during confession.

It looked like people had been gathering outside St. Agnes’s since early that morning, hoping to get a good view for the seven-thirty Mass. I looked for Manny and his parents in the crowd. Chances were Ricky wouldn’t show up. He’d be home waiting for his dad to come back from the night shift.

I saw Peter’s red scarf. He kept his eyes on the sidewalk and walked against all the black figures heading toward the church. I resisted the urge to call out to him. It wouldn’t be right here.

Word had spread that the mayor and a group of other important politicians were inside the church, in reserved
seats. Television and radio crews were trying to work their way into the crowd, sticking microphones in people’s faces, but the result was always the same: a polite nod, a raised hand, and a silent shuffle.

Men, women, and even some children were covered from head to toe in black. We walked steadily as one as if we were all on a conveyor belt stretching along Dundas Street.

The crowd stopped in front of the church and stood, waiting.

I was boxed in, squished against a man whose suit smelled of old books and Aqua Velva. He wasn’t very tall. I could feel my mother’s grip loosening. The crowd was pressing in and I could see the white of the inside of her arm between two people as she held on. It would have been easy to let go of her hand.

The organ music began and the shrill voice of the church’s singer crackled over the speaker system they had placed outside the church. The lights and bunting, the same kind that bordered Senhor Agostinho’s used-car lot on Bathurst Street, sagged against the front of the church; the Festa do Senhor da Pedra had been rescheduled out of respect for the Jaques family. My father chuckled when he heard my mother explain this to us. “It’s because the priests don’t want to lose money!” he said. “Always priests and money!”

I got stuck between two adults who now separated me from my mother. I had to push hard for them to move. My mother looked down at me and tried to smile. Terri kept shifting from one foot to the other—balancing herself on her platform shoes, and then crossing her legs, her face scrunched up in pain as if holding in her pee. The fingertips of one hand were covered in bandages; I still didn’t know how she’d explained that to my
mother. She whispered in my mother’s ear. My mother sighed, then nodded. Terri pushed her way back through the horde. One man refused to give way. She nudged her shoulder into his chest. I heard the faint trace of “Perv!” and saw Senhor Batista’s grin. He breathed in his cigarette and blew a steady stream through the black hole in his throat.

Senhora Gloria stood beside him. In her brown flowing robe she looked like St. Teresa, or Obi-Wan Kenobi. She was the holiest person I knew, but that hadn’t stopped her from guiding my finger onto her flesh and holding it there.

I caught a glimpse of Agnes standing behind her mother before the crowd closed in again and blocked my view. Last year she’d been as flat as an ironing board. Then one day it seemed they just appeared, glorious breasts about the size of pomegranates, and it was wonderful. I loved pomegranates.

Ten minutes passed—I counted 163 honks into handkerchiefs—before Edite appeared, squeezing herself between Senhora Gloria and Senhor Batista. She dragged my sister beside her. Terri looked pissed. Senhora Gloria’s face tightened as if she had sucked a lemon. Aunt Edite always dressed hippyish. My father said it was a sure sign she was a communist.

“I think I have an extra veil in my—”

Edite touched my mother’s hand to stop her from looking for it. She shook her hair in the morning sun and stretched her red lips wide. “I spent half an hour,” Edite told her, “flattening my hair with an iron. My hair
is
my veil.” My mother tried to get Edite to go with her to church, but Edite always refused. She passed the Catholic test in other ways. She could repeat Bible sayings:
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God
, or
He
that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone
. These phrases usually ended the conversation, forcing the topic into other areas: the price of mackerel, or urging my mother, who didn’t wear makeup, to make extra money selling Avon.

My mother looked at my sister. “Back so fast?”

“We ducked into Senhor João’s fish market,” Edite said. “He let us use the washroom—no need to go all the way home. It’s like a circus here,” she added. My mother pretended not to hear her.

A spell washed over the crowd. I saw the casket and understood why. It was small and glossy white. It seemed to float in the air, as light as Styrofoam over a sea of black. The brass handles flopped to the side, unused. Arms shot up to touch the coffin. People spread their palms and wiggled their fingers in the air like hungry children wanting something. The sniffles grew louder, the gurgle of sucking back snot. Some women had fainted in the heat and were carried out onto the sidewalk to be fanned. The smell of mothballs, cooking oils that had seeped into the fabric of their clothes, glycerine soap, and baby powder caked by sweat became dizzying.

The coffin tilted up at an angle. The crowd’s arms carried the box across the blue sky and into the dark, incense-filled church.

I saw my father standing at the top of the steps near the church’s entrance. He was dressed in a suit and held a felt hat to his chest. The sun bounced off his shiny head. I saw James there, taller than the rest and dressed in a tuxedo-printed T-shirt. He was about five feet away from where my father stood, his shoulders parting the crowd. I saw my father look back once, then again, and this time he nodded—a thank you, I thought, for James’s help on the day of the pig killing. I could
see my father moving his lips, speaking to James. James said something back and smiled. My shirt collar was digging into my skin. I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the warmth of the sun. When I looked back I saw Manny and Ricky had climbed the half wall of the church. Manny looked cool and relaxed in his shorts and Chinese slippers. Ricky stared at the wristwatch James had given him. They sat on the handrail beside James and my father. I could taste copper pennies at the back of my throat. My mother had said that today was a day for families, not friends. I poked my finger into the collar of my shirt and tugged. My mother drew my hand down and held it at my side.

“A
NTONIO!
Come here and help.” Edite didn’t have a laundry room in her apartment, so she would come over and wash clothes in our basement, when she was sure my father wasn’t around. “Damn sheets. Just hold on to the end until it comes through the other side,” she said. “Don’t pull, though. I don’t want to break the wringer and have your dad blame your mom.”

A tip of white sheet peeked between the two rollers of the wringer washer. She dunked her hands into the machine, the water up to her elbows. She fed the wringer again, then patted her hands dry on my mother’s apron and pulled a cigarette from her pocket. She lit it, took a deep drag, and blew out the smoke like it was the thing she needed most in the world.

A small radio sat on a shelf, in front of three framed pictures: Pierre Trudeau, the Pope, and JFK. The radio was set to the Portuguese station. They were broadcasting live from Toronto City Hall, with José Rafael’s voice battling static to deliver its message.
Nine days since little Emanuel was found dead and nothing so far. It’s time, I say. We can’t sit back any longer. That’s what we’ve done, and look what happened!
He made it sound like the community had given up.

After the funeral, my mother had locked the front door in the middle of the day. She saw Billy, Senhor Matos’s son, punch his own father on the front lawn. Senhor Matos was
afraid Billy’d go to prison if he kept running downtown and beating up the
paneleiros
—Portuguese slang for homosexuals. Other people were drawn into it. I overheard my mother telling my father that it came to blows and nasty things were said between neighbours. If I hadn’t been a prisoner in my own home, I would have run to the front yard to catch a bit of the rumble with my own eyes.

“My Johnny was able to wash his own clothes at your age. He’d just pop them into the machine.”

I turned up the volume on the radio.

“Then he’d press a button. Not like these washers you have up here.”

“My dad says dryers are useless—they waste electricity. Clotheslines in the basement are good enough.”

I could picture Rafael’s spit showering the microphone. We were proud and we worked hard. We did so quietly without bothering anyone. Rafael blamed the police and the politicians and the homosexuals for what had happened to Emanuel, one of our own.
Where is our voice?
he roared.

“Edite, do you believe that stuff?”

“What stuff?”

“That homosexuals are to blame for what happened to Emanuel.”

Edite shoved her cigarette butt into the pipe where all the grey water from the wringer washer drained. “Bad people did a bad thing. They’re to blame, no one else. But Antonio, don’t get caught in it.”